Mutant Hunt

In a not too distant future, which eerily looks very similar to the late 1980’s, cyborg drones will be needed to fill a gap in the workforce for some reason or another. Inteltrax is a company that’s filling that void. A mysterious person in the company that goes by the name of Z has decided that money and glory are much more important than creating more worker bees, so he’s taken it upon himself to drug the cyborgs in order to make them perfect killing machines that get their jollys by killing the innocent people of our fair land. When Z goes to far and takes one of the scientists responsible for creating the cyborgs as a hostage, the scientist’s sister escapes so that she can get the only man on earth that can save the day – and that man is Matt Riker (Rick Gianasi). All of this plays against a subplot of the ambitious and mysterious Domina, who only wants to see Z go down in flames by the hands of her own uber cyborg.

So, did any of that make a damned bit of sense to you? If I did my job correctly, it didn’t, because that would mean it conveyed the exact same feeling I had watching this entire movie. One shoddily put together scene with horrible acting connected to another scene with horrible fighting and a boob shot thrown in here and there for good luck. When they’re thrown together this badly though, there really doesn’t need to be much plot. You’re here for the entertainment factor and the special effects, right?

Sometimes watching this movie, I had the feeling that whoever was in charge just made stuff up on the fly. In some instances, the killer robots could stretch their arms like inspector gadget so that they could reach weapons on the wall, and others had super strength. I think what they were trying to go for was that there were 5 different models of these cyborgs and each had it’s own special ability, but they were really difficult to differentiate between the 5 of them. One of them looked like a big hulking brute, and the other 4 looked like generic average built guys – all with the same navy pants and long sleeve button up shirts with sunglasses and a last of the mohican haircut.

Not to poke holes in the already tissue thin plot, but these things are supposed to be super human. At one point they’re punching through styrofoam walls and pulling people’s heads off of their bodies, but when fighting the clearly superhuman Matt Riker and his gang of watered down super squaddies, they couldn’t even bloody somebody’s nose. These things were basically just heavy bags for the mixed skill levels Riker and his “operatives”, rarely landing a blow, but also rarely being defeated – until of course, they were shot one time with these pea shooter laser guns. Z was manufacturing these things for global domination, but they could easily be taken out with a well aimed laser. Hopefully in this future they take all forms of weapon away from the global citizenship, or else his enterprise is going to be short lived. Who the hell is going to pay for an army that can be taken down by effectively a spitwad?

All of this plays out with a pumping simulated Miami Vice theme song (a la Jan Hammer) just jamming out in the background. Who could ask for anything more? The foley work is horrible, with people walking in and out of the frame sound like a horse clomping around, or someone wearing wooden shoes. There’s also a constant noise in the background. It’s hard to put your finger on, but if you’re watching it in an environment where you’re wearing headphones, it always sounds like someone else is in the room with you. It would be easy to be annoyed by this sort of thing except that it’s so ridiculous and out there, you have to chalk it up to low budget charm rather than negligence.

It should be mentioned, just for curiosity’s sake that Mutant Hunt (which should have just been called Cyborg Hunt, but that doesn’t sound as interesting I guess) was directed by Tim Kincaid, who’s big claim to fame besides his B-Movie career is that he’s also known as Joe Gage, and is quite an accomplished gay porn director and actor. While I don’t care either way what he does in his spare time, he certainly has a knack for the absurd in his sci-fi endeavors. While Mutant Hunt is light on plot, the dialog is pretty bad, and the fighting is almost worse, it’s definitely a fun time despite the warts. It’s currently available via both Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, and at 75 minutes run time, it’s definitely a good way to kill some time. Mutant Hunt scores 3 keys posing as puckered buttholes on the back of a cyborg’s neck out of 5 (and just try to say that 5 times fast).